Features - Storage Innovations:

ARIO INTROS FAMILY OF SATA II CONTROLLERS

ARIO Data Networks, a provider of next-generation serial I/O solutions, announced a complete family of SATA II (Serial ATA) external storage controllers that provide OEMs the essential building blocks they need to create modular, cost effective SATA II external storage subsystems. ARIO Data's SATA II controller board products will be available beginning in the fourth quarter of 2004 and will roll out throughout early 2005. Incorporating ARIO's own high performance ASIC technology, the SATA II family will leverage the firmware, software and modular design from ARIO's highly successful family of SATA I controllers. With over 10,000 SATA I products shipped to date, ARIO provides OEMs a mature, field-proven code base, lowers the cost of OEM test and integration, simplifies SATA II field deployment, and reduces training and support expense. Separately, ARIO is also announcing a family of SAS (Serial Attached SCSI) external controllers designed to allow OEMs to create modular, available and scalable SAS-based external storage solutions.

Architected for Storage Area Network (SAN), Network Attached Storage (NAS) and Direct Attach Storage (DAS) environments, ARIO Data's external controllers enable storage OEMs to integrate dramatically lower cost SATA II disk drive technology into their subsystems, while providing the high performance and high availability feature sets that are needed in the enterprise subsystem market. Keeping with ARIO's modular design approach, the SATA II family will offer several different options for host connectivity, including 4 Gigabit (Gb) Fibre Channel, SAS and iSCSI host interconnects to SATA II disk drives. Additionally, ARIO's SATA II controllers will be fully compliant with the SATA II industry standard, including Native Command Queuing. Supporting both 3 Gb and 1.5 Gb bandwidth, ARIO's SATA II product line will allow the use of the new SATA II disk drives with 3 Gb speed but also provide compatibility with older SATA disk systems operating at 1.5 Gb. With SATA II's new feature sets, external subsystems will be able to provide additional fault tolerance, high availability and improved performance.

The move toward dramatically more cost effective storage subsystems using the SATA II disk interface is remaking the storage network and subsystem landscape with industry analysts projecting up to 32 percent of 2007 multiuser and subsystem deployments utilizing SATA.

"IDC expects SATA implementation to grow steadily this year and SAS in 2005 because the technologies offer new flexibility for designing tiered layers of storage with inherent cost savings," said Dave Reinsel, program director of storage research at IDC. "ARIO has positioned itself to capitalize on this growth by offering the performance and flexibility sought by storage vendors looking to offer SATA II and SAS systems."

"SATA II will continue to push cost effective, yet high performance SATA technology into a new paradigm in subsystem design, development and deployment," said Eric Herzog, vice president of marketing and business development of ARIO Data Networks. "ARIO Data's architecture, technology and solution set deliver considerable subsystem cost reductions, and support flexible host protocol for 4 Gb FC, iSCSI and SAS, while providing OEMs the essential elements they require for entry and mid-range enterprise subsystems."

Modular Designs For Modular, Scalable, High Density Subsystems

ARIO Data's Fibre Channel to SATA II, SAS to SATA II, and iSCSI to SATA II controllers support 16 SATA II disk channels and provide compatibility with SATA II port multipliers. With port multipliers and the coming 400GB SATA II disk drives, a single ARIO SATA II controller can accommodate up to 240 disk drives and up to 96TB of disk capacity. Support for such a large number of disk drives coupled with ARIO's dual host connectivity for 4 Gb Fibre Channel, SAS or 1 Gb iSCSI allows for the creation of very modular, scalable, and dense external subsystem designs. At the same time, the use of ARIO's high performance integrated storage and RAID ASIC insures that ARIO's controllers deliver the bandwidth and I/O rates supplied by such dense and high capacity subsystems.

The modular design of the ARIO Data SATA II controller family results in 80 percent of the hardware, firmware and software being common across board solutions. Unlike some of the dedicated connectivity-only products on the market, ARIO Data's modular approach gives OEMs maximum flexibility in creating subsystems that can connect to hosts via a number of different interconnect technologies -- 4 Gb Fibre Channel, iSCSI or SAS -- allowing OEMs to choose their preferred host connectivity chip supplier on any ARIO solution. In addition, ARIO's unique approach allows OEMs to use one board, firmware, and software combination for both JBOD and RAID implementations -- substantially simplifying the qualification, design and test processes for OEMs.

Additionally, as new host interfaces become available, ARIO Data's modular architecture will allow OEMs to easily produce low cost SATA II subsystems that utilize these new host interfaces. ARIO is working with a number of industry leaders to foster comprehensive interoperability of new host and disk interfaces as they come to market.

"Many enhancements included in the SATA II feature set are focused on bringing additional performance and flexibility to network storage environments and will be included in Maxtor's next-generation SATA hard drives, expected to be announced this summer," said Kevin Wittmer, director of technical marketing at Maxtor Corp. "ARIO Data's architecture and technology, coupled with Maxtor's next generation SATA drives may be used as a platform for high-capacity, cost-effective midline storage solutions for applications such as fixed content and archived data."

Advanced Software And Feature Sets

The foundation to ARIO Data's software strategy is in building a strong serial I/O architectural software platform based on modular software building blocks. This software model allows OEMs to create highly differentiated and sophisticated products while incorporating low cost SATA II disk technology. ARIO Data's modular software approach provides OEMs with a software scheme that easily allows the addition of new functionality and feature sets, improves OEM time-to-market, and substantially simplifies OEM qualification across a number of board platforms.

ARIO's controller family supports protocol translation from 4 Gb Fibre Channel, SAS, and iSCSI to SATA II; device emulation, bridge capability and robust error handling. ARIO Data's comprehensive SCSI/FC command set emulation enables SATA II disks attached to ARIO Data controllers to appear to the host and initiator devices as if the SATA II disks were standard SCSI or Fibre Channel disk drives. This allows ARIO Data to offer performance and availability features to its OEM customers similar to those available on Fibre Channel and SCSI subsystems. At the same time, subsystems that incorporate ARIO Data's controller family seamlessly integrates into existing storage infrastructures and preserves an enterprise's investment in installed host and server connectivity.

Advanced feature sets such as high-availability, dual redundant controller support with active/active failover/failback capability are made possible by ARIO Data's mature emulation technology. In addition to high availability, high performance RAID capability will also be offered to ARIO Data's OEM customers.

ARIO ASIC Technology

ARIO's SATA II controller product family incorporates ARIO's intelligent and integrated ASIC technology. This ASIC provides the integration of high availability I/O functions into single chip implementation that includes storage and RAID processing with SATA II disk I/O connectivity and additional dual high speed 3 Gb links for cache mirroring and cache coherency across redundant controllers. ARIO Data's SATA II controller product line provides up to 100K non-cached IOPS (125,000 cached IOPS), connects up to 240 SATA II hard disks (when used in conjunction with SATA II port multipliers), supports up to 96TB of capacity per controller, and delivers up to 700 MB per second bandwidth.

ARIO's sophisticated architecture goes beyond traditional chips used in past controller designs. By closely examining read/write traffic between host and disk, ARIO has developed technology that embeds hardware acceleration into its intelligent ASIC that improves performance dramatically over past approaches.

"Storage customers want to take advantage of the cost benefits of SATA, but need assurance that their storage investments provide enterprise-level features," said Arun Taneja, founder and consulting analyst of Taneja Group. "ARIO Data's technology provides OEMs with these features, including high availability, performance, density and scalability. SATA II will continue to dramatically change the storage industry in 2004, and storage technology vendors who can deliver cost savings along with performance and reliability will ride the wave."